Skip to main content
Main

Creamed Chipped Beef

Creamed Chipped Beef is a dish of boiled dried beef simmered in milk and butter, thickened with flour, served over toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Creamed Chipped Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Cover the dried beef with boiling water and let it stand for 5 minutes, then drain.

  2. Pick the beef into small pieces and place it in a bowl.

Make and serve

  1. In a skillet, melt the butter, add the beef, and stir until thoroughly heated.

  2. Sprinkle the flour over the beef, add the milk, and stir until boiling.

  3. Add pepper and serve the mixture on toast.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Beef + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,759 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Dried beef
Provides the main meat flavour and the salty, savoury character of the dish.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, which thickens as it heats with the flour.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and carries flavour when the beef is warmed in the skillet.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a creamy sauce as its starch cooks.
Kitchen bouquet
Adds a brown colour and a deeper savoury flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour into the beef and milk. Flour must be evenly dispersed before the milk is added, and the mixture stirred until it boils, so the starch thickens the sauce smoothly without lumps.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Roast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipesBeef BrothBeef Broth67 recipes